Executive Editor Michael Steele said the magazine holds to traditional journalistic standards: It does not pay for information and it does not dig through people's trash. You will not find stories about alien abductions and allegations of botched plastic surgery.
If the magazine gets things wrong -- like the mistaken report that Pitt joined Jolie in adopting a boy from Africa when it was really only Jolie on the adoption papers for a girl -- it corrects them. When Us Weekly is scooped, it credits its competitor.
"We want to be the paper of record when it comes to celebrity news," Steele said.
The magazine says that it purchases only photos that were taken legally and professionally and that staffers check the story behind each shot. It typically pays anywhere from a few hundred dollars for a snapshot of celebrities at a party to six figures for an exclusive set like the ones of Jolie and Pitt playing with the children on the beach in Kenya that ran in the May 9 issue. Recently, the magazine declined to run photos of Brooke Shields at a bakery shop with her daughter after learning that the photographer had been overly aggressive and made other children in the store cry. The editors say they regularly turn away photos that appear to be manipulated by computer.
Us Weekly considers its core reader to be the "cool girl"--as Min put it, the one who "has the right outfits first and had all the information first." The magazine is aiming for someone who is 31, well-educated, and makes $85,000 or more a year.
Min, a petite, 5-foot-2 fashionista with endless energy, personifies the "cool girl." Educated at Columbia University with a history concentration, she held her first job as a reporter at a Gannett Co. suburban paper, then rose through the ranks of People before being tapped as magazine legend Bonnie Fuller's deputy at Us Weekly. When Fuller left for Star in 2003, Min was promoted to top editor.
Min is one of the highest-paid magazine editors, with a reported salary of $1.2 million a year, and has filled 90 staff positions at the publication with editors from "serious" titles such as Newsweek, New York Magazine and Harper's Magazine.
Her goal is to break news.
Coverage of the MTV Video Music Awards last month was run like a military operation. Eight reporters went to Miami, and they were scheduled to work in shifts to provide 24-hour coverage from Thursday to Monday of the preparations, the show, the pre-parties, after-parties and ad-hoc parties.
Each reporter was given a Sony Treo "smart phone" to coordinate with the others. In all, they exchanged more than 1,000 messages that weekend, ranging from "This party is so lame" to 3,000-word files describing the gowns, the flowers, the rumors.
News director Lara Cohen, who led the team on the ground, said her instructions to reporters were simple: Get as many details as possible. If Mischa Barton picks up an hors d'oeuvre of shrimp on toast, did she eat the shrimp and toast or just the shrimp?
"We strive for pinpoint accuracy," said Cohen, a veteran of defunct media magazine Brill's Content and a former stringer for In Style.
